100 Great Indian Poems is a collection spanning three millennia and twenty-eight of India's languages, and includes poems that will be unknown to the most avid readers, as well as work by writers familiar to the world.

Edited by Abhay K. and available from 10 February 2018, 100 Great Indian Poems is published by Bloomsbury India and available on Amazon.

I was reporting on India’s 2014 general election, the one that would bring a tough-talking man named Narendra Modi to power. Sultanpur was a dingy, noisy town with narrow streets, filled with honking motorcycles and stray cows and donkeys eating garbage. Outside the congested lanes of the town, the country roads were potholed and meandered through villages with names like Teergaon and Isouli. Men here wore white turbans and women arranged their saris to veil their faces and buffalos dozed placidly in village ponds. This was what journalists always called the 'heartland of India'. It was my first time in the heart of the heartland. Born and raised in metropolitan Kolkata, I already felt like a fish out of water here.

The ceiling fans whirred a slow rhythm. Mould crept into the corners of the whitewashed walls; the wide windows looked out onto the barren prison yard. Nyo Maung was marched up to a low, wooden dock flanked by two long tables. His feet scraping across the broken floor tiles echoed angrily through the colonial hall. Before the Burma Socialist Programme Party emblem sat three court martial judges – two majors and a colonel – neat and robotic in their crisp green uniforms, with pomaded hair, wire-rimmed glasses and gold stars on their shoulders. Nyo Maung knew obedience had raised them in the ranks to where they could sentence any soldier to death.

Myanmar has been very much in the news throughout 2017. Conflicting and contradictory narratives vie for authority, and the result is a good deal of confusion about an already poorly understood country. Lucas Stewart has been working for years in Myanmar with the British Council and with Burmese writers and translators. Through examining the work both of established authors and of little-heard writers from the country’s ethnic regions, the aim was to reveal some of the country’s complexities of culture and identity. This resulted in an anthology of stories, many written in scripts that, until recently, were outlawed. The voices presented are authentic and universally human. We spoke to him about the project that produced Hidden Words, Hidden Worlds.

This piece is derived from Jeongshik Min’s paper 'A Visual Collective Biography of the Former Korean Comfort Women'. The collective biography in poetic form is inspired by ‘memory-work’ that moves towards a collective history. The Wednesday Demonstrations have been a central inﬂuence; Min’s visit to the House of Sharing, the group conversations, and the paintings by the former sexual slaves have provided material for the articulation of ‘the stories without voice’. The original text has been reworked by Shirley Lee with the author’s permission.

HAILED AS A SATIRICAL PORTRAIT of greed, corruption, ambition and violence in modern India, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, awarded the 2008 Man Booker Prize for fiction, breaks new ground in the literature of the subcontinent and in its approach to giving voice to the voiceless.

Liu Xiaobo is dead. That’s a fact. And that his death was at least indirectly caused by the cruelty and immorality of the Chinese government is obvious to anyone who has access to information about Liu and his imprisonment.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Second World War and the end of Japan’s occupation of Malaysia, Teoh Yun Ling is desperately seeking her own peace. She harbours a deep anger towards the Japanese, who interned her for three years in a labour camp where she lost her youth, her innocence, her sister – and two fingers. She is angry also with herself, for having survived when her sister did not. Her maimed hand is a reminder of deeper scars... Review by Kathleen Hwang

LUCK SELDOM rears its head in Alexander Khan’s memoir, Orphan of Islam. Khan was raised to be ashamed of his mixed-race heritage, was wilfully deprived of his mother’s love and cruelly abused in an effort to make him into a good Muslim. Born to an English mother and a Pakistani father, he was left stranded without a mother (who was cast out by his father’s family), a father (who died) or a true homeland. Early in the narrative, he recalls questioning his circumstances: ‘Why have I been singled out for such harsh punishment so far from home? What have I done to deserve this?’ Revieiw by Ysabele Cheung

SET IN MALAYSIA, When All the Lights Are Stripped Away is the engaging story of a young man’s coming of age, his search for his sense of identity and his acceptance of how the past pulls on the present. Divided between his loyalty to the memory of his mother, a painter, and his animosity towards his father, a powerful, influential businessman, Anil drops out of high school and flees his small hometown to Kuala Lumpur soon after his mother’s sudden, accidental death... Review by Kelly Falconer

IN A VERY BRIEF TIME, Escape from Camp 14 has become a famous book. This is not surprising. It is well-written and easy to read even if its subject is horrific. Since it began life in the form of a newspaper article, it has been serialized on BBC radio and extracted around the world in a variety of other newspapers. It tells the story of a man now called Shin Dong-hyuk, who lives in Seoul after having spent some time in the United States. But he was formerly Shin In Geum, born in one of the toughest North Korean labour camps where there was no faith, hope or charity, just sheer mind-boggling brutality. Today he has found a sort of peace, recount­ing his story to audiences who listen to his tale with horror... Review by James E. Hoare

Despite all the news coverage, precious little is known about what life is like for those in the so-called ‘Hermit Kingdom’. American author Brandon W. Jones seeks to address the deficiency with his debut All Woman and Springtime. Essentially a coming-of-age tale, the novel follows two young North Korean women as they make the transition from their teenage years to adulthood in the most brutal of circumstances... Review by Clarissa Sebag Montefiore

'They say they feed you first because the well-fed ghost is prettier.’ So observes Hyun Woo, the lead character in this novel, as he watches his fellow prisoners being led to the execution chamber. He is serving an eighteen-year sentence for his involvement in the Kwangju Uprising... Review by Lucia Sehui Kim

ELLEN THOMAS is a seasoned, award-winning British journalist embedded with British troops in Afghanistan; Jalil had been her ‘turp’ (interpreter). They were friends. He had saved her life, yet she refused to give him a loan that would have allowed him to study engineering in the United States. After he is killed she is remorseful and feels indirectly responsible, and takes it upon herself to find out how he died... Review by Michael Hoffman

WITH A Michael Ondaatje book, the images persist long after you’ve forgotten the intricacies of the story: a woman dying within a cave of swimmers in a desert (The English Patient); a young nun falling into the arms of a man building a bridge (In the Skin of a Lion); a truck driver crucified to the tarmac on a Sri Lankan road (Anil’s Ghost). His latest work, The Cat’s Table, includes another image that’s both spectacular and matter-of-fact: a ship passing through the Suez Canal, the demarcation line between Asia and Europe and the journey within a journey at the heart – and the exact mid-point – of this tale of transition... Review by Fionulla McHugh

Today, the 28th December 2010, is Liu Xiaobo's birthday and there seems to be no prospect either of his release or of an end to the indefinite house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia, who remains isolated without charge.

'I know exactly how you feel. I see you at the brekkie table, reading a newspaper. You – a decent citizen, a reasonably informed voter, patriotic in your own quiet way. I know exactly, because I’m the same. Whether it was Julia Gillard and Labor who got your goat, or Tony Abbott and the Liberals who make you spew, the urge is universal: you sit at breakfast and poke your finger once, twice, thrice into the newsprint or touch screen. You turn, tongue-tied, head shaking, managing only to say to your spouse: What a dickhead!'

Now I’m going to tell you a story about women and love, said Tunick. Or rather, it’s a story about the dark side of love: fickleness, jealousy, and fury. You shall witness many evil deeds committed in the name of love. It’s a story that unleashes your most perverted fantasies, in which you torture your ex-lovers out of guilt and feigned anger, ruin them with rumours, kill them with a borrowed knife, wipe out every single relative of your love-rivals, fornicate with your neighbour’s wife and daughter, kill your best pal and screw his voluptuous wife...

Margrét Helgadóttir is editor of the Fox Spirit Book of Monsters, a seven-volume series with titles published annually from 2014–2020. The first three volumes cover European, African and Asian monsters. In 2016, African Monsters was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Awards.

Hiuen Tsang spent seventeen years travelling from China to India and back in the seventh century CE, at the time of the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong. His adventures inspired Wu Ch’en-en’s sixteenth century novel, Journey to the West, which refers to India as ‘Buddha’s pure land’.

Maganbhai Patel is better known as Masterji, a portrait photographer of the Coventry South-Asian community. In November 2016 his first solo exhibition opened to massive acclaim, with features on local, national and international television, online and in local and national newspapers. In March 2017 his black and white photographs will be a centrepiece of the Mumbai Focus International Photography Festival. This from a man celebrating his ninety-fourth year. In this article, we reflect on the art of the Master through his portrayal of the lives of South-Asian migrants to Coventry during the second half of the twentieth century.

Nobody tells you how vulnerable you’re about to become. The plane lands and your emotions start to heighten once you pass through immigration. Even if someone is waiting for you in Arrivals, you know somewhere deep within that your whole world is about to change. You just have no idea how, or how much.

The first occurred at his point of birth. The second happened way before he was born. And the third repeated itself many times over his life. Strictly speaking, the third was not about him. It was about the pivotal impact he had on other people, which he never found out about.

Take, for example, Yik Fan. Gimme Lao and Yik Fan went to the same primary school. Being two years apart, they were not in the same class, nor did they end up in the same extracurricular sports team. As far as he was concerned, Gimme Lao never knew Yik Fan existed.

'I’m more interested in the North Korean people as individuals, frankly, and the identities we impose on them are the deeper concerns of How I Became a North Korean. Non-fiction would have required many betrayals or revelations that people might regret later, and though I’m aware that the memoir is a huge market, I’m far more interested in protecting the identities of real people.'

When Nixon met Mao, it was a bit like when Harry met Sally – the beginning of a long relationship that would prove to be fraught with tension and arguments, but also involved cooperation, mutually beneficial trades and cultural, artistic and personal interaction. It was also the beginning of a challenge to US supremacy as the world’s superpower, because China’s subsequent economic rise proved so startling and fast, much faster than the world expected.

Viktor and his friends are in thrall to Beijing’s new hedonism. They symbolise the possibilities open to Chinese youth who choose to experiment. Viktor is the lead singer in a Beijing-based band called Bedstars and is immersed in China’s underground rock scene. Describing themselves as ‘doomsday rock’, Bedstars’ influences range from the Rolling Stones through the Libertines.

The tiger lay sprawled upon a stone girdle that ran around the pipal tree’s trunk. He was a picture of elegance in his fashionably striped suit. His furry little member peeping out from between his thighs and the soft curve of his belly gave him just that little touch of helplessness, so attractive in all things male.

Li Mingqin would lean on his balcony railing and smoke a cigarette before going back to bed with a good book. He had lately been skimming through The Story of the Stone, and, although he wasn’t terribly interested in the teenagers or their whims, he was fascinated by the descriptions of the house interiors, and had practically off by heart the passage where Lin Daiyu arrives at the Rong-Guo Mansion.

It is raining, but people’s faces are flowing, hugging separate things as they enter the used-book store. They unhappily place their book in a vacant space and then one worn out book spreads open in secret.

Xue Xinran’s work is remarkable, not least for the way it has retrieved the lost narratives of Chinese people – and particularly women – in the twentieth century. Her latest book, Buy Me the Sky, relates the true stories of children born under China’s one-child policy which over three generations has had a profound effect on the nation. The book reveals the policy’s unintended price to China - broken continuities of parenthood, family, community and tradition.

Xinran, herself a product of the policy and mother of an only child, recently spoke to the ALR. She talked of her passion to articulate the experience of her people and in so doing, she revealed both the steely determination of a committed journalist and a mother’s indomitable spirit.

Read our collection of writing from and about Korea, previously published in the Asia Literary Review featuring material from the archive and our two issues specially dedicated to Korea: ALR23 (Spring 2012) and ALR30(Spring 2016).

ON THE FIRST DAY of spring Keita Hosokawa fell in love with a bird. If anyone had told him a week before that that would happen, he wouldn’t have believed it. He was fed up with birds. Specifically crows. More...

By the time I was in my thirties, I was fated to die, said the murderer, now in his forties. He spoke again. Murder is my profession. My side-job is to pose as a policeman, then extort from people. I murder only if it pleases me.

‘There are more poets than stray dogs in this country,’ Thitsar Ni, a leader of a Burmese poetic pack was heard to lament at a Yangon teashop. Burma/Myanmar, with its diverse literary and oral traditions, should not surprise you if it brags the highest density on earth of poets per square mile. After all, the Burmese are going through a collective adjustment disorder, known as transition. Besides, you don’t even need pen or paper to be a poet. You just need to utter your poem in the manner of poets of oral traditions and spoken word...

For three years, Tulene has had the bathroom to himself. Still, he keeps a milk crate stocked with the essentials just inside his front door, for easy access. If Old Chow were to find Tulene’s toothpaste beside the bathroom sink, or his towel hung on the bent nail poking from the back of the door, he might demand more rent.

Tea splashed from the cup half-raised to her lips, smudging the newsprint. Sheena couldn’t believe it but there it was, a half-page matrimonial advertisement with the title: Indian Billionaire Needs A Wife: Are you the ONE I am looking for?

Amanda Lee Koe presents the subtle and moving story of Arlene and Nelly, from Ministry of Moral Panic, winner of the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize (English Fiction).

'It wasn’t always this good, and Arlene never lets herself forget that. This is why she hasn’t gone to the doctor’s yet, despite the burgeoning lump in between the end of her armpit and the beginning of her breast, on her left side.' More.....

Amanda Lee Koe’s Ministry of Moral Panic is the winner in the English Fiction section of the Singapore Literature Prize 2014. This interview was published just before the awards were announced. Amanda is Fiction editor of Esquire (Singapore) and is the editor of creative non-fiction web platform POSKOD.SG. The winners of the Singapore Literature Prize were announced on 4 November 2014.

The Asia Literary Review spoke to Claire Tham, whose novel The Inlet, published by local Singaporean publishing house Ethos Books, is a contender in this year’s Fiction (English) category. Claire is no stranger to literary prizes. At the age of seventeen she won two prizes in the 1984 National Short Story Writing Competition. ‘Cash-based awards are an obvious attraction!’ says Claire. With the prize money earned when she was seventeen, she was able to buy her first pair of contact lenses.

'I have to say to you that what you have now – your courage and hope, solidarity and discipline – are so precious. You have no idea how people in the dark corners of the world, me included, covet it. It is an honour and a blessing. Hold on to it, for your own hopes, and for ours too.'

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In Issue 25, we highlighted the plight of Paco Larrañaga, still in prison after a deeply flawed trial and sentence in the Philippines. Grammy-nominated musician Bob Regan is on video to explain why he was moved to write a song dedicated to Paco and to the need for his release. There's also a petition for Paco, and the Give Up Tomorrow website offers ways to help the Philippines recover from the devastation of Typhoon Haiyan. Re-read Luis Francia's moving article for the ALR on Give Up Tomorrow, the award-winning documentary about Paco Larrañaga.

This poem was inspired by the death of Jyoti Singh Pandey who was gang-raped in a bus in Delhi on 16 December 2012. She later died in a hospital in Singapore, where she was sent for treatment by the Indian authorities. The Indian media called the 23 year-old woman Nirvaya, the fearless one. It was her father, Badrinath Singh, who revealed her name. He wanted the world to know who she was.

CORRUPTION is widely acknowledged as a serious, and endemic issue in China. Yet only occasionally – when big cases such as that of former Chongqing Party Secretary Bo Xilai, or news of the extraordinary wealth accumulated by the family of Premier Wen Jiabao, come to light – is the public provided with a glimpse into the rarefied world of corrupt, elite officials.

The subtitle of this book is ‘Hong Jun Investigates’, and it’s one of four in a series starring the same protagonist, a lawyer who has returned to Beijing after spending several years studying and working in America...

From 14 February 1989 onwards, Salman Rushdie did not receive his post directly. Instead, every letter or invitation went to his agency, where it was screened and tested for explosives before a member of his protection team would pick it up and take it to him...

THE HERO OF THIS STORY is the eponymous thief, who recounts his life as a pickpocket in Tokyo, and how he moved from petty crime to involvement in a murder. He never tells us his name, and it is pronounced to him only once...